Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Some recent events in European football (soccer) reveal the exagerations that surround the evaluation of the contemporary manager. It has been very surprising to read progressive sports journalists applaud the substitution of Louis Van Gaal by José Mourinho at Manchester United. The Dutch manager had been there the last two seasons and had signed a contract for three years. His deputy was Ryan Giggs, who was learning the job alongside a more experienced boss. Van Gaal failed to qualify the team for the Champions League in the second season (not the first) but won the FA CUP in this second year. It is true that the attacking performance of the team was poor, but he promoted some talented very young players (as he had done for Ajax, Barcelona and Bayern Munich). He has behaved as an honest professional and was building a team for the future in the best interest of his club. He will be replaced by a divisive character, who will make headlines every week but will be completely self-centered and promote values that are at odds with respect in sports. He will take advantage of the promotion of young players by Van Gaal, such as Rashford, Lingard, Fosu-Mensah or Martial, players that Mourinho would never have dared promoting himself. But the narrative that Van Gaal is an unfriendly guy with obvious public relations problems is just too appealing to be dismissed by popular journalists, never mind their opinions about other aspects of society. The fact is that no manager is always successful. We will see after 25 years managing teams whether the likes of Guardiola and Mourinho have a record like the one of Van Gaal, which is also not perfect, but is decent enough. Meanwhile, we saw in the Champions League final how a very celebrated manager, AT. Madrid's Diego Simeone, made obvious mistakes that a manager that had done his homework would have avoided. If you win the toss of the coin in a penalty shoot-out, you should choose to kick first, because teams kicking first win 60% of the time (perhaps because of a psychological advantage, according to research by economists Apesteguia and Palacios-Huerta). Simeone's players made the same mistake as Pier Luigi Buffon in 2008 when in the quarter final of the Europcup he chose that Italy shot second after winning the toss of the coin (Spain won the shoot-out, and the rest is history). Atlético's goalkeeper seemed unprepared for the shoot-out, not even moving in several of the kicks (as opposed to the Dutch reserve goal-keeper in the quarter final of the last World Cup under Van Gaal as manager). Not having preprared well the shoot-out it was surprising that Simeone did not give orders to take advantage of physical superiority in the extra time, with a too cautious behaviour for which R. Madrid should be very grateful.

Sunday, May 29, 2016

According to what I heard today in the BBC, the "Brexit" campaign has conceded defeat on the economy, and they are only focusing on immigration now. In the "Andrew Marr Show" program, the former Greek minister and economist, Iannis Varoufakis, and the former British Primer Minister Tony Blair, who basically hate each other, agreed that there is no economic argument in favour of leaving the EU. Varoufakis claimed that the only winning argument for the Brexit campaign could be about sovereignty and democracy (although he did no go into the details), but that Brexit leaders are not even focusing into that, and instead only talk about immigration, trying to awake xenophobic fears among the voters. It is not surprising that the campaign to leave the UK has conceded defeat on the economy, because according to a poll 9 out of 10 British economists reject leaving the EU. It is very difficult to find a similar level of consensus about any other topic among economists. As for sovereignty, what the British voters and voters all over Europe should care about is how to re-establish sovereignty and democracy at each relevant level, and forget about old notions about monopolistic national sovereignty. This is what newspaper The Observer had to say today: "Those surveyed were members of the profession’s most respected representative bodies, the Royal Economic Society and the Society of Business Economists, and all who replied did so voluntarily. Paul Johnson, director of the independentInstitute for Fiscal Studies, said the findings, from a survey unprecedented in its scale, showed an extraordinary level of unity. “For a profession known to agree about little, it is pretty remarkable to see this degree of consensus about anything,” Johnson said. “It no doubt reflects the level of agreement among many economists about the benefits of free trade and the costs of uncertainty for economic growth. The poll also found a majority of respondents – 57% – held the view that a vote for Brexit on 23 June would blow a hole in economic growth, cutting GDP by more than 3% over the next five years. Just 5% thought that there would probably be a positive impact.The economists were also overwhelmingly pessimistic about the long-term economic impact of leaving the EU and the single market. Some 72% said that a vote to leave would most likely have a negative impact on growth for 10-20 years."

Friday, May 27, 2016

In Spain it has become fashionable to argue that we live in a climate of systemic corruption and clientelism, and that the solution is a big bang of simultaneous reforms in a short period of time. The correct part of the argument is probably that the difficulties of reforming corruption come from a collective action problem: it is only individually rational to avoid corruption if everybody else does the same. However, this is where the problems start if we apply the argument to Spain or to other developed countries. First, I'm sorry to say that in Spain corruption is not systemic. One can go about with his life on a daily basis without facing corruption: the police is not corrupt and the burocracy is not corrupt, which does not mean that they are perfect. Teachers are not corrupt: we grade exams as fairly as we can. Most public things in Spain are not for sale. There is some corruption in the link between politics and business (but most politicians and bussiness people are not corrupt), and there is corruption inside some industries. There is also a tax evasion problem, which you realize is not a particularly Spanish problem once you read the book by Zucman on the topic. Therefore, in Spain you do not need to change everything to eliminate corruption. It follows that what is needed is to spread the influence of the parts of society (the majority) that are not corrupt. The typical example given to argue that we need a big bang is the transition in Sweden from a very corrupt country to one of the most decent in the world. One famous Spanish economist gave the example of the change in traffic rules in Sweden: in the first half of the XXth century, it seems that they switched from driving on the left to driving on the right from one day to the other. Well, I checked if the same happened in reforming corruption, and the answer is no. Reforming corruption took time, probably more than one century. The article "Getting to Sweden" by Rothstein and Teorell takes two parts, because it needs to cover many decades. Sweden started to reform corruption after losing a war (against Russia, by which they lost Finland) made most agents aware that they had to change habits. The authors show proofs that the Swedish changed first the social norms and subsequently they changed formal rules. It took time. Then in the twentieth century, because of a political coalition between employers and low wage workers (no technocrat designed the system), they centralized collective bargaining and achieved salary compression, which is at the root of current equality levels. In addition to that, they have a very generous system of redistribution that is based on good third party information, broad tax bases and a good combination of efficiency and equity (for example, public goods and services complementary of work). The fact that today they are a relatively homogeneous society with high levels of social capital is probably a product of their fair redistributive and efficient system, which in itself also reduces incentives for corruption. Therefore reforming corruption perhaps also requires improving distribution of income, power and resources. Reforming traffic rules is much easier: it is a purely common interest efficiency problem.

Sunday, May 22, 2016

We all participate, have participated or will participate in some organization, either as members (perhaps founding members), as workers, as donors or as leaders. That is why it may be interesting, even for non-professionals, to read about what social scientists who have investigated the failure and success of organizations have to say. A useful starting point is the "Handbook of Organization Economics," edited by Gibbons and Roberts in 2013. But more recently a useful survey has been published in the Journal of Economic Literature about "Why Organizations Fail: Models and Cases," by Luis Garicano and Luis Rayo. Although the case examples they give seem a little bit superficial (for example, the Spanish savings banks or "cajas"), their theoretical arguments provide a useful list of topics to care about if one is involved in an organization. For example, from the theories about the multi-dimensionality of effort, successful organizations tend not to care too much about the short run, although this implies overcoming the constant temptations to put too much emphasis on it. And successful organizations tend to think very carefully about the allocation of talent. In particular, organized groups should acknowledge that talent is heterogeneously allocated. This is so in the double sense that some people have more of it (so that more talented individuals should be located in a hierarchy to have an influence on the rest of the organization), and also in the sense that talent is also multi-dimensional, and some individuals have specialized talent that should be allocated with precision in the point of the organization where it can be most productive. Of course, making organizations succeed is as much an art as a science, and there is a lot of randomness involved. But thinking about these issues will not hurt anyone that worries about the future of his or her organizations.

Friday, May 20, 2016

One and a half years ago the magazine The Economist published an editorial
with the title "Catalonia's future: let them vote." It argued that,
although Catalan independence was a bad idea, it should be defeated in a
referendum. This was ammunition not only for separatists, but also for
many reasonably minded people who are against independence but for a
variety of reasons believe that a referendum about this idea that they
do not like would be a good thing. Now The Economist (the
editorials and articles are not signed by any individual in this
magazine) has changed its mind. In the issue just published it runs an editorial against the notion that referendums are in general a good idea, and it has a more specific piece
explaining that the fashion of holding referendums in Europe is a bad
idea. Perhaps it is because, being a British publication, they are
experiencing what is the dangerous descent into a democracy of bad
quality with the Brexit referendum. Both in the editorial and in the
article, they regret that with the Scottish referendum the membership of
the Scottish separatists, although they lost the referendum, has
quadrupled. They also repeat some well known arguments against
referendums, such as the inability of this mechanism to consider
trade-offs and therefore making it very likely that they will result
into incompatible bundles of policies. "Referendum fever (...) makes it
increasingly hard to agree on transnational policies. Treaties are
generally signed by governments and then ratified by legislatures.
Adding referendums to the mix hugely complicates matters. “It’s almost
impossible now to see how 28 states would ratify an EU reform treaty,”
says Stefan Lehne of Carnegie Europe, a think-tank. Minorities of voters
in smaller countries may be able to stymie Europe-wide policies; just
32% of Dutch voters took part in the Ukraine referendum. This could
cripple the European project. “Europe cannot exist as a union of
referendums,” says Ivan Krastev, head of the Centre for Liberal
Strategies, a Bulgarian think-tank."

Thursday, May 19, 2016

The chapter by Baland, Moene and Robinson in the Handbook of Development Economics, devoted
to governance issues, has a very good explanation of the difficulties of
reforming bad governance. One well-known issue is the need to take into account
not only de iure institutions but also de facto practices (as their account
of central banking in Sierra Leone or Zimbabwe illustrates). But less
well-known mechanisms are the path dependence of practices even when the elites
change, or the fact that elites find new ways to satisfy old objectives when their
old instruments are removed. This is called the see-saw effect, and here’s is how they explain it: “Many poor
growth experiences are accompanied by a system of dysfunctional laws and
regulations and other aspects of governance. An obvious idea might be to
directly intervene in these components of governance and promote change in laws
and regulations. This was the sort of reasoning that led to the famous
Washington consensus some of whose components, for example, privatization of
state enterprises, deregulation, and legal security for property rights all
seem related to governance. The first pitfall of reform is that directly
reforming specific institutions, policies or aspects of governance may not be
sufficient, and may even backfire. The reason why such reforms may be
ineffective is that it is usually not a coincidence that some aspect of
governance is bad. Bad governance is probably fulfilling some political
objective. But there are many different ways and a multitude of instruments to
achieve a specific goal. Taking away one instrument without altering the
balance of power in society or the basic political equilibrium can simply lead
to the replacement of one instrument by another with little net effect of the
ultimate goal - economic performance.”

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

I have seen that there is a group called "Economists for Brexit". I feared it would be a long list of right wing nativist professionals of the economy, but I am relieved to see that they are only eight economists. I lived almost three years in London, and I spent previously some weeks at Oxford. I am an anglophile who watches the BBC (the best contribution of the Brits to civilization). My PhD supervisor was an English professor. I have English great economists as co-authors and friends, and I had another great English economist as member of my thesis committee. I am very happy to see that none of them are among the "Economists for Brexit." Actually, I do not know any of the eight members in the group, whose chair is the chief economic advisor of the xenofobic former mayor of London, Boris Johnson. Of course now I cannot follow all the details of the referendum debate because I am not there, but it seems to me that this group is very far away from the mainstream in the profession. When the magazine "The Economist" has the same position as old Labour, new Labour, and "trostko" Labour, which by the way is the same position as the decent wing of the Conservative Party and all the Liberal Party, one wonders what kind of economists they are. As it happened on occasion of the referendum about the independence of Scotland, the nationalists are losing this referendum precisely because of the economic debate. They may still win at the end (I hope they do not), but if they do, it will not be because of the economic arguments. The UK needs free trade with Europe, at the same time that it keeps some influence on European rules. The UK needs immigrants, as the rest of Europe does. And the UK will still be admired by people like me if they remain the cosmopolitan, tolerant and open country that I have always enjoyed.

Sunday, May 15, 2016

I apologize to Branko Milanovic because I am reading his last book, "Global Inequality. A New Approach for the Age of Globalization", in a very disorganized way. My only justification of this disorganization is that I attended an advance presentation of the contents at Barcelona before last summer, and I had the privilege to talk to the author after that. I have also presented the main graph of the book to my students in a couple of class groups. In this now famous graph, Milanovic explains how the main losers of globalization have been the middle classes of developed countries, and the main winners have been the middle classes of the emerging countries and the richest one percent in the developed countries. In the book, the author explains the main forces driving these results, both the forces explaining the evolution of within country inequality and those explaining the evolution of inequality among countries. I already knew about some of these explanations, and that is why I went straight to the last two chapters, where Milanovic analyzes the politics of inequality and summarizes some of the main ideas and proposals of the book. Here and there, the author goes back to something that also appears in the rest of his work: the relationship between inequalities and the organization of power and sovereignties. The last chapter questions the methodological nationalism that still guides many of our thoughts, the idea that the nation-state is the main unit of analysis. Of course, politics works mostly still at the national level, but we would do better if we started changing the paradigm to better deal with phenomena that today trascend this level. The national politics is working in worrying ways (and mainstream parties including socialdemocratic parties are at least partly responsible for that) that are very difficult to predict, with the upsurge of populist and nativist right wing parties or candidates in many countries (I missed the Italian Northern League in Table 4.11). When he explains the differences between the USA and other non-European countries and Europe relative to the experience of immigration, he has a wonderful sentence: "...European nation-states have historically been either ethnically homogeneous (...) or, when they were not (as in Spain), the diverse groups have lived next to each other for such a long time that the cultural and normative differences between them would seem rather small to an objective observer." As if realizing that the usual suspects would not like this sentence, he clarifies in a endnote: "I am aware that "objectively" small differences may loom large in the view of people concerned." Read this book.

Thursday, May 12, 2016

The study of institutions and policies in network industries, especially in developing countries, is dominated by two different theoretical frameworks. One is the second best approach explained in a book by the late Jean Jacques Laffont in 2005, "Regulation and Development". Laffont argues, using theoretical models (mostly based on asymmetric information) and some empirical evidence, that developing countries face many constraints that make it impossible to apply policies that come close to first-best solutions. For example, the social cost of tax distortions is much higher than in developed countries, which makes it much more difficult to use subsidies. The general idea is that if reform has to be introduced in network industries in a context where much else is not reformed, then regulatory reform will necessarily be piecemeal and not a big bang transformation. The other theoretical framework has in economist Pablo Spiller its intellectual leader. Spiller's approach is rooted in the transaction cost economics pioneered by Nobel Prize winners Ronald Coase and Oliver Williamson (who themselves have work on regulated industries). This school, much less formal in its approach but equally based on rigorous empirical methods, argues that the main issue in institutional choice is to minimize transaction costs, so that social interactions can find the quickest possible route to efficiency. In network industries the main source of transaction costs is the commitment problem faced by investors: by anticipating opportunistic regulations, investors will be reluctant to invest in sunk assets in the first place, unless institutional mechanisms exist that make private investors confident that opportunism will not happen. Then Spiller argues that these institutional mechanisms will be different across countries, and that to be useful they will have to adapt to the institutional endowment. For example, the way to achieve commitment in Chile (detailed legislation) will be different from the way to achieve commitment in the United Kingdom (a license system with independent regulators). Both approaches have developed with real cases and real problems in mind, but without much dialogue (or so it seems to me). But in essence they are not that different: Laffont emphasizes the importance of local constraints, as Spiller does. The second best approach is more static, more formal, more normative, and the new institutional approach is more dynamic, more multidisciplinary, more positive. But they are not incompatible, and perhaps a synthesis is overdue before we move on to new complementary approaches that for example take into account behavioral issues and social norms.

Monday, May 9, 2016

I started my interest in the economics of regulation studying the telecommunications sector, back in the early 1990s. I wrote my master's thesis about it (who knows where it is). Then I moved to the EUI in Florence where I became a full time academic and worked on my PhD thesis. The thesis was about the political economy of regulation. I had two theoretical chapters and an empirical one. One of the theoretical papers was inspired by the access pricing problem in telecommunications, but the part that was finally published (International Journal of Industrial Organization, 2008, with Paul Levine and Joanne Evans) reflected only the first part of the chapter, which was an abstract regulatory problem that could be applied to any monopolistic segment of any industry. So gradually I lost track of the technical details of telecommunications regulation, precisely when it was becoming more complex due to very rapid technological change. When I spent eight months in Berkeley in 2008, I studied regulatory federalism and among other materials, I read the first edition of the book by Nuechterlein and Weiser on the history and current economics of telecom regulation in the USA. I also went through some of the controversies in Latin America, Spain and the rest of Europe as I studied institutional issues related to regulatory independence, the merger of agencies and regulatory federalism in practice. I was also involved in a consulting project about mobile virtual network operators in Spain. But mostly, I have spent more time on other topics in the recent past: institutional economics, political economy and related issues. Now I'm switching on again, as I am trying to prepare with a colleague a policy paper on the behavioral problems of regulators as applied to telecom regulation. I found that a good way to get back to business was to buy the second and substantially revised edition of the book by Nuechterlein and Weiser, the recent papers about telecommunications policy by Ingo Vogelsang, and the just published paper about Net Neutrality in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Sunday, May 8, 2016

A great friend of mine from London, after reading my previous post about Owen Jones, asks me to comment on another article in The Guardian about the anti-semitism of parts of the left, this one by Jonathan Freedland. This article raises the issue of the relationship between anti-semitism and positions about the right of the state of Israel to exist, which was a topic perhaps conveniently avoided by Owen Jones. As argued using the words of Jones in my previous post, I take the position that anti-semitism in the left is present, unaccepatble and disgusting. But am I ready to accept that Israel has the right to be an independent sovereign state? I do accept it. But I do not accept it because of a generic acceptance of the right of "any minority" to have their own independent state. That is unworkable and is at the root of a lot of opportunism in many secessionist movements, including Catalonia and Scotland in the bloodless side, and the Balkans in the bloody side. Some of these movements also use some of the rhetorical arguments used by Freedland, such as "any" minority having the same rights or the need to be "in charge of their own destiny." These arguments cannot be acceptable for any self-proclaimed nation, as previously argued by liberal thinkers such as Kymlicka and Buchanan. I accept the right of Israel to have an independent state because of the very specific circumstances, unique and dramatic, that led to the creation of the state of Israel after Second World War. I also accept the argument that Israel is the only democratic state of the region where it is located, although many policies of Israel's government are unacceptable. At the same time I have many doubts that the "two state solution" is a workable and reasonable solution in our globalized and multi-identity world, as was argued some years ago by the late historian Tony Judt. Difficult as it is, Israel should be a multi-national state, at least as multi-national as our great cities like New York and London are. Let's see what my great friend from London (a city where this week thousands of people from multiple religious and ethnic backgrounds have elected a muslim Mayor) thinks.

Monday, May 2, 2016

One of the voices of the new left in Europe, Owen Jones, has spoken clearly about the need to eradicate any trace of anti-semitism in progressive movements. Here is what he said in The Guardian:

"Antisemitism is currently being discussed in the context of the Labour leadership contest, of which more shortly. But suffice to say that, although the sole attempt in human history to exterminate an entire people by industrialised means forced Europeans to confront pandemic antisemitism, this cancerous hatred remains. It can be overt. Take the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn in Greece, feeding off the despair of austerity; take the antisemitic Jobbik party in Hungary, which one in five Hungarians voted for last year; take the foul intolerance of murderous Islamic fundamentalism. But it is not simply the preserve of neo-Nazi skinheads; it can be subtle too, and it finds expression not just on the right but on the left. All cases need to be confronted for what they are. The Labour leadership frontrunner, Jeremy Corbyn, has been a long-term supporter of the Palestinian justice movement. He could not possibly have known the personal backgrounds of every individual who has joined him at the many rallies he has attended over the years. Some of these people were antisemitic. And while the vast majority of people involved in the movement are – like myself – driven by a passionate support for self-determination, there is a minority that indulges antisemitic tropes. These ideas have to be defeated. Yes, supporters of Palestinian justice get unfair criticisms. “Why do you focus on the plight of the Palestinian people rather than, say, the horrors committed by Islamic State or the suffering of the Kurds?” some ask. (...) I have challenged dodgy pronouncements from people who profess to advocate Palestinian justice.Jewish people are sometimes told that antisemitism is caused by Israel’s actions, for example. These are the same people who would never dream of victim-blaming members of other minorities, or claim that anybody was at fault other than the bigot themselves. Others play linguistic games: how can it be antisemitism, they say, when Palestinians are also “Semites” – members of a group of people originally of the ancient Middle East that includes Jews and Arabs – even though “antisemitism” has meant “anti-Jewish hatred” for generations. (This is like saying, “I’m not homophobic because I’m not scared of gays.”). There are those who imply that Jewish people are somehow synonymous with the Israeli government (a slur echoed by some uncritical cheerleaders of Israeli state policy). And some use terms like “Jewish lobby”, a classic antisemitic trope suggesting there is an organised Jewish cabal exercising behind-the-scenes influence worldwide. And so on. Antisemitism is too serious to become a convenient means to undermine political opponents. It is a menace: not just in its overt forms, but in subtler, pernicious forms too. There’s no excuse for the left to downplay it, or to pretend it doesn’t exist within its own ranks. Rather than being defensive, the left should seize any opportunity to confront the cancer of antisemitism and eradicate it for good."

Sunday, May 1, 2016

When I spent eight months in Berkeley in 2008 I saw in the corridors of the University of California academics of the calibre of Barry Eichengreen and Robert Reich. This week-end I had the occasion of knowing about their opinions on the economic and political crises of the recent past (which started precisely those months in 2008). I have been reading most of the book by Eichengreen "Hall of Mirrors" and I watched on the BBC the interview of Reich in the program Hard Talk. "Hall of Mirrors" is a fantastic book on the parallels between the Great Depression of 1930s and the Great Recession of 2008. It deals with experiences at both sides of the Atlantic in both historic episodes. It has many lessons, which I could apply to my own interests. For example, when talking about the crisis in Ireland, he explains that the fact that it was a small country did not help in disentangling the collusion of interests between politicians, bankers and regulators (this is a useful insight for those thinking that the independence of small nations will automatically increase democratic quality). Or he explains that in the UK the conservatives took advantage of the crisis to push their small government agenda, driving a campaign to eliminate a large number of public agencies. Or how central banks added responsabilities on financial supervision to those on monetary policy, but creating internal walls to separate both functions, to reduce the conflicts of interests among them. I would have found the last two insights useful when I was working on a paper on the merger of regulatory agencies in Spain (but now this paper has already been accepted by a journal). The interview of journalist Stephen Sackur with Robert Reich discusses the campaign between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Reich has endorsed Sanders but says that he will vote for Clinton if she is finally the nominee. He calls for the Democraric Party to channel the energies of the anti-establishment movement led by Sanders and that has its origins in the Occupy Movement. If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency and accepts large parts of the platform of Sanders it will be more difficult to argue that socialdemocracy faces an international terminal crisis.